01 - What is your niche?

Blog Assignment #1 - What is your Niche?

1)  What do you consider to be your medium, style, and services of choice?  Describe why you feel that is the case.

Down the UX route, services in the realm of mobile, website, social media would be a good place to start. I am extremely interested in voice UX and would like to pursue that route, I want to make sure there is a product I can design within the voice UX realm to solve a problem people need. I don’t want to force voice design on myself just because I want to do it.  I think creating something that coexists between mobile and voice would be the best route to take that would live in the ecosystem of the smart home.

My style is clean and simple, usually with easy to read icons. I am familiar with the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and Google Design. I try to keep up to date on all of the latest and greatest that is out there.

I am greatly interested in voice design, especially the linguistics and information architecture in a conversation form. Creating a voice skill to solve a common day problem or make a person’s life easier is the goal.

There is another route which I can take. There is a program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that is called MediFor (media forensics). This program is really neat because it’s building an AI tool that will be able to determine if media has been manipulated with to check it’s credibility. The success of the project would be measured if it could be built into Facebook or Google, giving the consumers the power to know what they’re looking at is legit. An extension could be built into the mobile application to educate consumers on what they’re viewing to eliminate “fake news.”

2)  Conduct some research and identify and target potential clients and partners you hope to work with in the future.  Provide links and write a few details about why you choose those individuals, companies, etc. 

AMAZON. I think this is the most obvious choice. I’d love to work for Amazon, create something that is distributed or hosted within their network. As of April 18, 2018, there are over 100 million people who pay for Amazon Prime (https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-member-numbers-revealed-2018-4). So to start there, how many people in there have an Alexa device? About 39 million people (https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/12/39-million-americans-now-own-a-smart-speaker-report-claims/). 

“The adoption of the device for in-home voice assistance had a trickle-down effect as well, as 44 percent found they started using the voice assistance on their phone more since getting a smart speaker.” (https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/12/39-million-americans-now-own-a-smart-speaker-report-claims/).

But who has a smart home? How much does it cost? Do I target the household that has maybe one or two smart home devices or a household that is riddled with an entire connected system?

Quick stats from 2016 (https://www.marketingcharts.com/industries/technology-63952):

Millennials (18-34) comprise the largest share, at 44%, followed by Gen Xers (35-54; 33%) and those aged 55 and older (24%). Smart home technology adopters also skew more male (57%) than female (43%).

Retired Amazon Echo and Alexa VP Mike George would be a good SME to follow about his logistics with his time spent at Amazon. 

Ashwin Ram is the Senior Manager, Alexa AI

Another route to go through would be Google. “Rishi Chandra, the vice president of product management for Google's home and living room products.” (https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17583592/nest-ceo-marwan-fawaz-steps-down-google-home-reorganization).

3)  What common frustrations or needs do your services or products address?  How does your business solve a problem or find a solution for your customers? In particular, do you solve problems that nobody else can? Through your research create a list of the kinds of problems you are most interested in addressing after you graduate with some details as to why that is the case from both a skills and interest point-of-view. 

For Voice UX: voice ux solves common day tasks to be easier to accomplish with a voice interaction with a robot. Sometimes talking to a robot doesn’t work though. That’s why there is research being done on whether to make more mechanistic or humanistic voice assistants. There are many more people out in the world  that are smarter and more qualified than me to solve these problems, but it’s whether Or not they are going to.

Recently Facebook has launched campaigns that will bring the platform back to what it was designed to do in the first place, connect people with each other to keep updates on their life. In the commercials you’ll see people blowing out their birthday candles or celebrating a vacation with family. This isn’t battling fake news it’s turning the other way hoping it’ll go away on it’s own.

Problems I’m interested in addressing: As a UX designer, I want to make something easier for someone. I know that’s so general, but I want to stay open minded. I love solving problems and figuring out how to make someone else have a good experience. 

4)  Conduct a bit of secondary research to see just how competitive your chosen market is.  Create a list of links with short sentences describing how competitors are approaching their niche to address the kinds of problems that interest you. 

MediFor: https://www.darpa.mil/program/media-forensics - this is the program I mentioned earlier that is building an AI tool to detect changed media. This technology could be built in to Google, Facebook or any news platform to battle fake news.

Amazon Smart Home: https://www.amazon.com/smart-home-devices/b?ie=UTF8&node=6563140011 - Amazon is the leading market with the smart home industry.